DreadBall Season 2 is heralding a summer of Kings of War – and Ronnie was keen to tell you all about it!

Firstly, thank you for your patience. Kings of War and the plastic range behind it has taken a back seat for too long – but reinforcements are on the horizon. And when this vast horde arrives surely the world will tremble!

Mantic set out to make fantasy and sci-fi war gaming affordable and fun. We wanted to bring innovation in, and enjoy huge battles fought between epic armies – and that means the sets need to be affordable, and easy enough to assemble and onto the battlefield. We always intended to have a rule set – but were quite aware that people might want to use or affordable models in many other gaming systems – and one in particular

Last year we released our first hardback rulebook, after two years of beta testing. It contained all the army list and rules needed to play a complete game of Kings of War. The game is designed to be played between armies filled with numerous regiments and lots of models, but it still ends with a clear result in just a couple of hours (with lots of death along the way!). Just before the book released we put it on Kickstarter and asked people to help us add more units to each of the main armies, such as werewolves, Orc chariots and even Dwarf cavalry!

At the beginning of the campaign we thought we would get backing to make a few units for each army and possibly bring a few regiments forward from future years. We also hoped to get a new book with a range of heroes in it. We were very surprised at the staggering response. 28 days and no sleep later, we had raised financing for 22 new plastic units, and funding for the complete human army – plus a few exclusive models and many heroes – an unthinkable achievement at the beginning of the campaign.

We had to then get on with sculpting and tooling them all – no easy task – especially because we wanted to keep our standards as high as they had always been.

This May sees the new sets ship to our backers, and then the range will roll out to retailers’ and on to the gaming tables around the world. We will be presenting the range as the figures and kits for Kings of War. However, we expect many sets will get picked up for other gaming systems – both RPGs and Wargames. The funding has allowed us to release these kits at fantastic prices – so while the kickstarters benefited, we can also release these sets into the trade market at very keen prices. For example a pack of three trolls will be retailing for just £14.99 $24.99 – and they are going to look something like this…

To show just how many sets are now available as new releases here is a list of the kits we will be releasing through retailers in June, July and August (NOTE that this is NOT to be confused with the package Kickstarter Backers will get – there will be an update on the kickstarter detailing the KOW Shipment 2 contents next week.)

- Trolls

- Orc Gore Chariot

- Orc Fight Wagon

- Undead Mummies

- Undead Werewolves

- Undead Vampiress Lady Ilona

- Undead Lord Malak

- The Basilean Legacy

- Basilean Men at Arms

- Basilean Paladins

- Basilean Crossbowmen

- Basilean Elohi

- Basilean Sisterhood

- Basilean Sisterhood Lancers

- Basilean Paladin Knights

- Basilean Chariot

- Basilean High Priest

- Kings and Legends

- Ogre Warriors

- Ogre Shooters

- Ogre Grokagamok

These will all be at great Mantic prices, and supported with 2 complete books. One book ‘Kings and Legends’ will be focused on the heroes that live in Mantica, and their forces.

The second book ‘The Basilean Legacy’ looks in detail at one of the powerful human armies that battle all comers as they defend their realms. This expansion also has some basic army lists for two new factions and more rules for magic and magic items.

Here is a video of the work-in-progress Men-at-Arms sculpts (our first foray into using 3D sculpting for hard plastics!) and some shots of the sculpts – we expect this human army will be massive!

Work In Progress Men-At-Arms

Basilean Paladins

Basilean Sisterhood

All summer we will be running Kings of War events, and treating this as a launch for the system and the kits. We will be running tournaments through the summer, and nationals in the autumn in the UK and USA and trying to get more in central and Western Europe and Australasia (please get in touch if you are interested). Overall we will be having a massive support program to help build the system, and on the back of the popularity of Dreadball we hope many new people will be looking again at Mantic and what we have to offer.

So, please accept my apologies for not getting you more product sooner, I hope the coming month’s releases will make up for it.

And thank you, for sticking with us and support us while we charged off with Dreadball and other projects. We will never leave it so long between big, exciting releases again!